Improving Clinician Satisfaction In Transplant Centers

If you work in healthcare you know the trends – burnout among clinicians continues to grow. According to a new report authored by doctors at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, physician burnout has increased from 45.5% to 54.5% in the past three years. The 2018 National Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report revealed that burnout among surgeons was at 51%.

So how can a transplant administrator deal with the challenges around clinician burnout?

There have been many articles that cite electronic medical record systems and lack of interoperability as two of the root causes of clinician burnout. In a transplant center setting, clinicians are heavily dependent on records coming from outside healthcare organizations for their new patients. Worrying IF they can obtain those records, how quickly it’s possible, and then how long it will take to review those records to prepare for a patient’s first appointment, are all burdens that weigh heavily on your clinical team.

The industry is working toward achieving true interoperability. However, there will be thousands of patients seen by your team before that time comes. Finding solutions that can alleviate some of the stress they experience can help reduce clinician burnout rates.

eHealth Technologies has worked with transplant centers across the country for over 10 years. In the beginning, our role was focused on retrieving medical records and images. By partnering with transplant centers, we are able to reduce the time it takes to obtain records by up to 60%, and what we retrieve is a complete record – not just bits and pieces of records that leave many holes for the provider to deal with.

Today, we do more than just retrieve those records quickly. Our full suite of services is a game changer for many of the centers we work with. Retrieving and providing access to the records has become table stakes. We have moved beyond that to offer solutions that can positively impact workflow. Services, such as the organization of records into a fully searchable document that is put in chronological order by record type, creates incredible time savings for clinicians. Being able to access the records within the EMR or PACS systems also reduces the time it takes to prepare for new patient appointments.

These may seem like a small part of transplant patient care, but these small parts have a big impact. Our customers report a 95% or greater satisfaction after the implementation of the eHealth Connect solution. With the satisfaction in our solution comes side benefits for the transplant center, not the least of which is reducing clinician burnout. Knowing that the complete record for a new patient will be available for them to review is a big win. Plus, knowing they can review the record quickly and efficiently, in their home EMR, using their preferred key terms, makes it easier to create an effective treatment plan. Clinicians feel as though they can provide better patient care, which gives them greater job satisfaction.

We know that partnering with a company like eHealth Technologies to assist with medical record and image retrieval and organization may not be the norm for all healthcare facilities today. But those that do, experience many benefits beyond just reducing clinician burnout. As this issue continues to grow, it is imperative that healthcare leaders look for new, innovative solutions that can help address it. We owe it to our clinical teams, and our patients, to think differently and try new operational approaches and workflows.